An undercover journalist reveals the working lives of the thousands of migrant women flocking to Britain’s sex industry

W
hen the American journalist Gloria Steinem put on a bunny outfit and went
undercover at the Playboy Club in New York in 1963, she exposed the reality
of working women’s lives in a trailblazing essay, I Was a Playboy Bunny. By
echoing the battles that all 1960s women faced, her notes on the pros and
cons of bunny work made her a feminist hero. With humour, she managed to
humanise and familiarise sex workers and make them “one of us”.

In Invisible, an examination of migrant workers in the modern British sex
industry, the Taiwanese-born journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai has also gone
undercover. ­Posing as an undocumented Chinese immigrant, rather than
putting on a bunny uniform, Pai took maid’s jobs in brothels in Burnley,
Lancashire, and in Stratford and Finchley in London, in an attempt to
illuminate the murky world of the women — almost exclusively from Asia and
eastern Europe — gravitating